"Edge," he said again, and the rope learned a new note.
The jointed tip plucked once more—light, precise, as if testing not the rope's strength but its pitch. Silk on his thumb cooled further, fine as breath. Evan did not lift the staff; he rotated the Pumpkin orb so the caught strand wrapped around glass with a faint, almost greedy cling.
"Roles," he said, calm. "Archer—rope only, eyes on my wrist; you move when I move. Knife—rope with him; your blade touches silk only and only on my say. Chief—lane keeps points low. Nobody stabs into beans."
The spearwoman angled her point toward the gap, still outside the line. "And me?"
"You pin threads to posts," he said. "If it ties the rope, we tie it to the world."
Aurora's hum thinned to a needle. "On my count," Evan added, "give me sparks, not lightning. Snap stitches; don't cook crops."
The Mech Goblin shifted, wrench held low, stance set to pry instead of crush. The cracked lens glowed like stubborn faith.
The jointed tip tapped again, then retreated. The hedge breathed the quiet way silk moves—air changing shape without permission. Two pale lines cast themselves into the gap, kissed the rope, and went taut, as if the field had grown new vines overnight.
"Don't cut rope," Evan said for people who would in panic. "Cut silk."
The knife-man lifted his blade and stopped when Evan's palm flattened. "On me," Evan said. He held the staff out, orb first; the wrapped strand offered itself. "Aurora."
A whisper of blue erased the thread with a sound like a hair singed over a candle. The orb did not scorch; beans did not brown. The cut end snapped back into the hedge and took its anger with it.
"Again," Evan said.
Aurora obliged—quick, mean pips that nipped lines without drama. The rope sang a little, then settled into the old note that meant work.
A rustle came, not weight—intent. A thin line arced out and caught a villager's pole where it met the hands. The man jerked; silk doesn't feel like much until it refuses to let go. The pole began to angle toward the hedge like a leash being drawn.
"Drop," Evan said. The man let go, good student. The pole skidded forward, then stopped halfway, the silk too short to claim it all the way. "Shove with a second," Evan said; another pole nudged the trapped one back to the lane. "Don't fight threads with hands."
The hedge accepted the loss and cast another line—this one for the rope itself.
"Pin," Evan said.
The spearwoman stepped in—no, not in—she set her butt-spike deep in the lane and leaned, sinking the spear's haft outside the beans to press the silk loop hard into the post's bark. The thread tried to find angle; wood refused to be skin.
"Archer—slack two, pull," Evan said. The line breathed; the silk wasted its geometry on the wrong distance and went slack enough for Aurora to snip.
[HIT] (Aurora's micro-arc)[STATUS: THREAD CUT]
"Again."
They did it twice, then three times. The hedge started to sound irritated, which is to say it sounded like nothing and made everything else sound louder.
"I'm learning your grammar," Evan murmured. The Pumpkin orb had three fine rings of silk on it now, cooling in layers. He rotated the staff and caught a fourth loop, letting it wind politely.
The jointed tip appeared again, closer. It touched the rope as if greeting, then pulled. The line thrummed like a plucked vein. Farther in the hedge, something rearranged its legs.
"Ready," Evan said. He set his boot deeper into the furrow; the Mech leaned hip-to-hip; Aurora took height.
The hedge delivered a body at last: pale, not white—bone-yellow glossed with dew. Eight limbs, the front pair longer, ending not in hoof but fine hooks. A head low and clever, eyes like wet beads in a crown of too-many. A mouth built to make thread before it bothered with teeth.
It didn't charge; it arrived the way silk does—quiet, present, certain. It lifted a forelimb to strum the rope for itself.
"Meet," Evan said.
The Mech went low and inside, wrench angling to catch the limb before hooks found purchase. Metal kissed chitin with a sound like pliers biting glass. The limb skittered; rope sang and didn't stick.
"Aurora—eyes," Evan said. A pair of tiny arcs struck the bead cluster. The Weaver flinched, not blind, but newly aware of light.
"Rope—slack," he said. "Now pull." The line obeyed, and the Weaver stepped into the wrong distance. Its belly brushed the rope; two rear legs tangled for a heartbeat.
"Pin it," Evan said to the spearwoman.
She did not commit. She suggested—a neat sideways nudge of haft to keep the Weaver's angle bad without inviting a grab. The thing corrected; Evan bought the correction with a sting under the front joint—the place where motion becomes decision.
[HIT]
The Weaver's body rose a hand's width in surprise. The Mech slid the wrench under its head, levered—not to lift, to deny angle. The creature tried to step over the rope, found Slack, then Pull turning the world into a trip.
"Drive," Evan said.
The Goblin shoved. The rope lifted under the Weaver's abdomen and then took it, not as snare, as floor; Aurora snapped a thread that was trying to be a lifeline. Evan cracked the staff again at the head-joint where the brain asks permission from legs. The Weaver clattered into the wedge of bodies with an offended scratch of chitin on hide.
"Finish," he said. The wrench landed three short, mean jabs at the hinge; Aurora's arcs blinded an eye cluster; Evan pressed the staff tip to the mouth for one brief, disciplined burn.
The body went still in the way of things recalculating whether existence is still cost-effective—and chose no.
[ENEMY DOWN: HEDGE WEAVER (LV?)] [CHECK: formal name/level][LOOT GENERATED]
Flags twitched, gold and hungry.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED][POTENTIAL AMPLIFICATION: RARE SILK / VENOM GLAND / LOCAL RENOWN] [CHECK]
"Later," Evan said automatically. "No bare hands," he added to the lane. "We log outside."
He set the knife and staff together and tested the carcass. UI highlights obligingly kissed seams the way they had on boars, but different—finer, precise.
[HARVESTABLE: WEB GLANDS | EYE CLUSTER | EXOSHELL SPLIT | THREAD COILS] [CHECK: exact node naming]
He worked quick and neat, letting the system's highlights guide him. The silk clung to the Pumpkin orb with infuriating affection; he spooled what he could around the glass and then cut it with Aurora's smallest spark.
"Log," the Chief told the boy. "Weaver—one. Thread coils—count as one."
The boy's charcoal squeaked.
Two more strands arced out of the hedge together and kissed the rope with intent. A third fell high and found a villager's pole, made of the line a puppet. The man started to pull back on reflex.
"Drop," Evan said. "Then shove with a friend." They did; the pole came back without hands learning anything they'd regret.
"Pin," he told the spearwoman.
She stepped—still edge—and used the haft to push one silk line into bark and another into a carcass rib. "This counts as post?" she asked, dry.
"Today," he said. "We let the dead pay rent."
"Aurora," he added, "cut on my point."
He lifted the staff, orb collecting a loop; the sprite stitched a micro-arc along the line; silk popped, clean and small. The second strand quivered; he pointed; it died; the rope settled.
The hedge hissed in a way plants don't.
It came again, smarter—two strands for the rope, a third for the Mech, a fourth for the spear haft. The Mech's wrench snagged silk and flung it wide; the spearwoman rolled the shaft under, pinning thread to a post with nothing but weight and grace; the rope took the two lines and sang; Archer and knife kept it honest; Aurora cut in a zipper of tiny blue.
"Now a lunge," Evan muttered, because he could feel the cadence. The hedge obliged. The second Weaver cleared the brush in a crouch designed for roofs and lies.
"Meet," he said. The Goblin shaved its leading limb off angle. The rope slackened and then found song; the Weaver's belly bumped line; Evan stung the head joint; Aurora blinded the bead cluster; the spearwoman's haft nudged angle without trespass.
[STATUS CHANCE: ENTANGLEMENT—LOW] — [SUCCESS] [CHECK: UI phrasing]
"Drive," Evan said, and the Weaver refused, lifting on thread that was not there because Aurora had edited it out of the script. It toppled forward into carcass and post and the kind of geometry that converts good legs into bad leverage.
"Finish."
[ENEMY DOWN: HEDGE WEAVER (LV?)][LOOT GENERATED]
The rope settled again. Stakes looked less temporary. The wedge was turning into a room that the forest disliked.
"Close the tear," Evan said. "Row—set. Pull." The villagers did, hands steady, voices quiet.
Threads began to net—not in front, but between hedge and rope, as if a hand with too many fingers had decided to weave a curtain. Lines found the wedge bodies and the posts and the rope in quick, clever knots that meant to slow them, not him. Silk kissed the Pumpkin orb without asking.
"Anchors," Evan said. "We use its work as ours. Pin lines to carcasses. Knife—only silk, outside. Archer—on me, you give me breath in the rope on count: two slack, pull."
They pinned. The spearwoman made a habit of pressing silk into bark and bone in the same motion, minimal and efficient. The knife-man nicked thread from outside; the archer read Evan's wrist like a metronome. Aurora cut what Evan pointed at and ignored what he didn't.
The net thickened. The hedge began to play, plucking a rhythm that made the rope's song strange. Evan felt the line vibrate under his arm in patterns he didn't like—long-short-long, a language trying to teach itself to him.
"Don't answer," he said, which sounded mad and helped. "We keep our own measure."
A strand tried for his staff hand; he lifted the orb and wrapped it, turned the gourd until silk wound neat and tidy. He had a spool without meaning to and decided he'd meant to all along.
"Archer—slack. Now pull."
The rope breathed; the net sagged toward the posts, put its faith in angles it shouldn't. Aurora sizzled three junctions. The web's middle lost coherence and quilted in on itself like a badly sewn shirt.
"Drive the center," Evan said.
The Mech stepped one pace and put the wrench face into the net—not to tear, to move—pressing silk onto carcass ribs. The web became an ally by accident.
A new Weaver glanced over the hedge, thought better, and tried to reattach the net in a hurry. Evan gave it a sting at the head joint to keep the timing wrong. Aurora popped two more stitches and then went quiet at his gesture.
"Hold," he said. He was breathing like work now, not fear.
[HUNDREDFOLD: CONTEXT FLAGGED] blinked again, somewhere between admiration and suggestion.
"Later," he said, not even irritated this time.
They harvested the second Weaver quickly—glands logged, coils wrapped on the orb until it looked like a lantern caught in cobwebs. The Chief's boy wrote, letter taller than the last, 2 — Weaver; Thread coils +2.
"Hands," Evan said to the villagers, to the raiders, to the field. "We're closing this with posts and dead things. Edge only."
The spearwoman lifted her spear butt and sighted down the haft like an officer inspecting a line. "You're making it ugly enough to live."
"That's the plan," he said.
The hedge responded with a lesson of its own. Three jointed tips reached out together and plucked the rope—in rhythm. Long, long, short, long. The line under his wrist thrummed not like panic, not like song—like a sum.
It wasn't a call to charge. It was a test of whether their measure could be seduced into theirs.
"Hold," Evan said, and felt the word go down the posts and the carcasses and into the rope like a nail hammered clean. "We do our math, not theirs."
The tips plucked again—farther apart this time, as if disappointed. A fourth emerged, thinner, paler, tapping lightly at first and then hooking. Silk began to dress the rope in scarves.
"Pin," he said—for the tenth time, maybe the hundredth. He didn't count. He knew the language now.
The spearwoman pressed two new threads into bark with the grace of a woman reminding a child how to behave. The knife-man's blade kissed one line and swore off the second because it crossed into beans. Good. The archer gave him slack, then pull, then slack, then pull, every beat on Evan's wrist.
The net resisted and then sagged. Aurora's sparks edited critical junctions. The rope settled into its own voice again—old, honest.
"Close," Evan said. "Set. Pull."
They did. The gap shrank to an ugly vowel again. A last, sullen strand tried for the Pumpkin orb; he wrapped it, then nodded. "Cut."
Aurora's micro-arc sang; silk snapped; the strand twanged back into green where it belonged.
For a breath, the hedge simply was. No boar breath. No silk hiss. An insect remembered to be an insect.
He didn't relax. He let the field decide if it wanted to be a farm again.
The rope hummed under his wrist like something that had just survived its first song and wasn't sure it liked music. Evan looked at the orb wrapped in fine coils and thought about thread as currency. He thought about vendors who would pay for coils and glands and hides. He thought about Hundredfold, which had been knocking politely.
He didn't open it.
[YOU OBTAIN: WEAVER THREAD COILS ×?] [CHECK: quantity][YOU OBTAIN: VENOM GLAND ×?] [CHECK][COINS: +?][REPUTATION: +? (Novice Village)]
"Log," the Chief said softly, as if softness could keep silk from hearing it. The boy wrote, hand steadier than Evan's first hours had been in other lives.
The archer exhaled as if discovering lungs. "You know," he said, conversational again now that nobody was dying immediately, "I had a story about Summoners. It didn't have rope in it."
"Most stories don't have rope until they need it," Evan said.
The knife-man grinned without joy. "Guild's story's going to have names."
"The rope will spell them," the Chief said.
The spearwoman rolled her shoulders and watched the hedge. "It isn't done," she said.
"I know," Evan said.
The jointed tips reappeared—five now—spaced along the gap, plucking in a new pattern: quick-quick, pause, quick. The sound wasn't sound; it was felt more than heard, a tension added to the wrist and the back of the tongue.
The rope took on the rhythm grudgingly, as if an instrument hates the player but must vibrate anyway.
Evan stood very still and let a thought he did not like arrive completely: if the hedge could play the rope, it could maybe learn what their slack-and-pull meant. And if it could learn, it could teach a many.
"Edge," he said, quieter than before, for all of them. "If this becomes a choir, we either keep the song ours or we cut the instrument." He felt the line breathe, the posts agree, the wedge settle.
Five tips plucked in time, and somewhere deeper in the brush—farther than a stone, closer than a minute—another line answered, out of sight.
Evan lifted the staff an inch, silk-wrapped orb refusing to be anything but obvious. "On me," he said. "If I say cut, you drop the rope, and we lose a rule to keep the lane."
The line under his wrist quivered, loyal and unafraid. The hedge tapped back, patient as a teacher.
He didn't blink.
"Edge," he said one more time, and counted the rhythm to decide whether he was keeping a song or breaking an instrument.